The article offers new perspectives for the future development of piezoelectric materials and devices.

On July 4, a research team led by Professor Li Fei from the School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Faculty of Electronic and Information Engineering at Xi'an Jiaotong University (XJTU), and the National Medical Research Integration and Innovation Platform published a review titled ‌Ferroelectric Materials toward Next-Generation Electromechanical Technologies in Science. ‌This marks the first article on piezoelectric materials and devices ever published by the journal.‌

The article summarizes recent advances in high-performance piezoelectric materials and devices worldwide. It highlights the urgent demand for such materials from industries such as medical ultrasound and consumer electronics and proposes potential solutions to overcome current performance limitations, offering new perspectives for the future development of piezoelectric materials and devices.

The teams of Professors Li Fei and Xu Zhuo from XJTU have developed multiple novel high-performance piezoelectric ceramics and single-crystal materials. Their work has driven technological innovation in piezoelectric devices for medical ultrasound, consumer electronics, and other fields, gaining widespread recognition from international research communities and industries.

Their work includes the development of transparent piezoelectric single crystals, in collaboration with the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology of Chinese Academy of Sciences, which are used in novel photoacoustic imaging probes.

They ‌improve photoacoustic signal sensitivity by a factor of four‌ and ‌enhance imaging signal-to-noise ratio by 10 decibels‌, significantly boosting image quality. This paves the way for biomedical applications using photoacoustic imaging and acousto-optic multimodal imaging based on transparent transducers.